Category: MMO Musings

Smile Week: Incredible Ubiquity

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I was going to kick off Smile Week. About which ideas I’d pull together and what stories I’d share. Unfortunately I’d spent a lot of time thinking and not very much writing, which isn’t very helpful.

As I sat on the train between Manchester and Winchester staring out of the window into the darkness I wondered how to start it all. Then I did what any gamer would do – I picked up my smartphone and had a quick blast on Cut The Rope. Feeding Omnom those delectable pieces of candy made me realise something.

Gaming is everywhere

The normal reaction to this is “so what?”, and it’s a reasonable response. But it wasn’t so long ago when playing video games meant hooking a mysterious box up to your telly, digging out an audio cassette and praying to the gods of small chaos that your game wouldn’t crash when the tape stopped.

Since those early days gaming has spread to infest itself in almost all consumer electronics devices made today. They’re no longer tethered to the home, instead being as portable and accessible as a book.
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Engineer Gazimoff’s Smile Week

Posted on by Gazimoff

Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Game

I’m going to start off with a screenshot. I can’t remember when exactly it was taken, but it was early on in my Warcraft gaming career when the raidgroup I was in was clearing through Blackwing Lair. That puts it at late 2005 or early 2006 – I don’t quite remember but it’s probably something like 5 years ago.

Back then the game was a completely different landscape. Raiding was new, MMOs were new, voice chat was new. Spell rotations were built on what seemed to work rather than World of Logs parses. If I had to give it a smell, it smelled like dirt after a heavy rain. I remember the days when I used to log in and just stand in awe.

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In Defence of the Trifecta

Posted on by Gazimoff

In almost every MMO that I’ve played there have been three classic roles to choose from. A tank is the one who soaks the damage for a party, a healer keeps the party standing and the DPS are there to deal damage.

I like dealing damage. I don’t know if I have a thing for big yellow numbers flashing up on my screen or if it’s just some latent button-mashing left over from my childhood. It even moves into first-person shooters – in Team Fortress I’m playing either the Soldier that only has eyes for the rocket launcher or the Sniper that will camp somewhere for hours to get that perfect headshot. It’s why I’ve also set up DamageBin, a forum dedicated to those who love dealing damage in MMOs

It’s not that I haven’t tried tanking or healing. I’ve tried both. I’ve even tried melee DPS. I just don’t get on with them. I don’t find it particularly hard or difficult, I just don’t enjoy the role. Call me strange but they just don’t click for me.

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Free to Play: MMO Retirement?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Like many people, I recently heard that Star Trek Online was moving to a free-to-play model. In all honesty I’m not surprised, and like Spinks I think it should have used that model from the outset. Reaction to the news also seems to be positive. Some say that it means that they’ll give the game a try, while others are surprised this move hadn’t been made sooner.

I’m not convinced about free to play models myself. My own prejudice is shackled with two issues about free to play – they’re either poor quality item shop games or former subscription MMOs that failed to pull in enough subscriptions to sustain themselves. I know this is a sweeping generalisation that’s unfair to a lot of games out there, especially that Lord of the Rings Online has done quite well since they swapped models last year.

My own experience of Star Trek Online was limited to the beta, which I didn’t get on with. I had a real dislike for ship to ship combat, mainly because I was brought up on a diet of X-Wing and Tie-Fighter. In many ways I was hoping that Jumpgate Evolution would fill that hole, but the ongoing legal battles have since crushed that hope.

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The MMO Blueprint

Posted on by Gazimoff

The recent game conventions have shown us that there’s a collection of top-tier MMOs heading our way over the next two years. It’s a great time to be a fan of the genre as there are some really interesting concepts emerging, both in the game worlds we’ve seen and the mechanics that have been revealed.

As the convention euphoria fades away I’m left with a lingering doubt. Only one or maybe two of these games will ultimately be successful. The rest, while being technically adept, will struggle to reach the same level of popularity. I wasn’t sure why though – it felt like a gut feel.

I decided to run a Twitter poll asking a single question – what are your three most important features in an MMO? Thanks to everyone who replied back and took part, I really appreciate your help. The results are in, and it’s these results that I wanted to share.

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Google Cannot Make Good MMOs

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’ve been mulling over a question for a few days about how we choose which MMOs to play. What draws us to one game world over another, how some attributes are more important to each of us than others. I’m going to be writing more about it towards the end of the week, but I wanted to share a bit of a prelude today.

You see, today I finally added my name to the list of people who have deleted their Googe+ account. I’d grown weary and tired of the constant non-arguments about why they want to prevent pseudonymity. A ZDNet article made it fairly clear – Google+ is an identity service first and a social network second. Now things make sense. I don’t need another identity management service, so I nuked my account.

I can already hear you wondering “But Gaz, what does this have to do with MMOs or gaming at all?”

An MMO at its most basic is a single player role playing game with a multiplayer chatbox. Slightly more advanced games invoke more social network features – friends lists, guilds and so on. Games developers realised early on is that it doesn’t matter how gamers identify themselves to each other that matters – it’s what they experience while playing the game that’s important.

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The Flaming Kitty Copter

Posted on by Gazimoff

Crafting is one of those things I love about MMOs. Being able to gather stuff in the game world and make items from them always makes me smile. It doesn’t even matter if they’re useful or not as long as they do something – anything.

The only thing that gnaws at me is that crafting always seems to be a little limited. From Warcraft to Minecraft there are specific schematics that stipulate the stuff that’s required to make the item. You never get a chance to go off schema.

At least not normally…

I don’t know how I made the connection, but it all started back on an episode of GroupQuest. We were talking about Fandral Staghelm transforming into a flaming cat as one of his phases, and how he also dropped loot that would allow any druid to become a flaming cat too. Of course I had to take it a step too far.

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Fear of the Fansites

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back in May 2010 the Warcraft blogging community were asked if they’d consider writing for the World of Warcraft Official Magazine. I have to be honest with you: I considered it, asked a few questions but ultimately didn’t go through with it. I was a new blogger on the scene (still am by most accounts), still finding my voice and didn’t think I’d have anything the editors would be interested in.

While my opinion of my own writing hasn’t changed much (Gaz in print? Ludicrous idea!) it’s something I’d like other bloggers to achieve if it’s the career they want to go for. Which made me all the more surprised when I read this blogpost from the first Editor In Chief of the aforementioned magazine.

The first question that came to mind was that two well known and respected contributors to the community had their names stripped from the first issue on Blizzard’s request. I’m not sure why they’d ask for such a thing and I don’t really want to second guess their motives, but it does raise some troubling questions.

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The Lure of the Franchise

Posted on by Gazimoff

I was recently chatting to a friend about how we felt about Warcraft these days. We were both a little jaded and going through the same cycle of log in, raid, log out. I can just imagine a line of heroes forming outside the entrance to Firelands, punching the machine as they clock in for the evening, their shoulders slouched and dreary. Just another day at the office.

We then got talking about the games we were looking to move to in the future. I mentioned how Guild Wars 2 looked neat, how Wildstar looked like a lot of fun and how The Secret World seemed interesting with it’s alternate reality take on things.

His response? “Star Wars!”

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Is It Fun?

Posted on by Gazimoff

I was recently reminded about something that happened during a recent-ish beta. I’ll spare the blushes of the game involved by not mentioning names, but I’ll share this little episode. There was a bit of a conversation on the beta forums that went a little bit like this: one group of people didn’t like the game at all while the other group felt that it was perfect.

I chimed in with my own thoughts. I felt that the graphics engine had been poorly built, making me feel that my finely tuned computer was rendering a powerpoint slideshow of my relatives recent trip to France. I felt that the network code was abysmal, with players and NPCs popping around the place like dancers in a nightclub with a slow strobe light.

Technical issues aside, I felt that the interface was so clumsy it was like juggling fish while riding a unicycle on an oil slick and trying to spell that Welsh train station. I felt that I had enough time to compose an epic opera to the God of Sewer Rats while waiting for creatures to respawn. There were key concepts in the game that weren’t explained in the in-game help or the forums, turning city travel into some twisted point-and-click adventure.

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